Today's Original Voices

Two Small Birds

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Dan Charles reads Whitman the way some people read the Bible. He works three jobs. He attends college. Dan’s older brother sells industrial parts and wants out. Dan wants something. In Two Small Birds, the brothers take flight in the worst possible way. This is the story of what it means to be family, to be working class, and to dream of being a poet in a world that refuses books. Set in tiny apartments and roadside diners, truckstops and warehouses, dive bars and worse hotels, Two Small Birds is a story of misdemeanors and perseverance, the jobs we take and the lives we lose. It’s the story of love, and whoever is in charge of that.

Editorial Reviews

“Funny, outrageous, and somehow tender in a world of bad jobs and worse relationships, Two Small Birds is a road novel about what it means to lose control of everything you love and desire. This is art. This is a writer telling the truth about the world. This is a book about what literature has forgotten: truckdrivers and salesmen, waitresses and prostitutes, the fallen and the hanging on. Dave Newman is an enormous talent who drops insights like a jeweler sets diamonds. Two Small Birds dazzles. It’s a novel to light the way at the beginning of the 21st century.
– Alicia Erian, auhtor of Towelhead

“There are writers who understand America and there are writers who understand an America most writers don’t write about. This short-money, low-end, no expectations, working class just-skating-by America is the one Dave Newman lays bare in his achingly beautiful, badass and authentic novel, Two Small Birds. Call it Truck Driving America. What Newman has created in this big-hearted, gritty book is a kind of road novel, where the road is one you and everybody you know just want to get the hell off of, before it kills you or works you to death. Readers will hear echoes of Raymond Carver, Daniel Woodrell and Denis Johnson, but in the end Two Small Birds earns Newman a place of his own in the pantheon. Two Small Birds is really a book to love.”
– Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight